Thoughts on the Diorama

Okay - before discussing any artist in detail or any artistic statement specifically, I want to dispense with some ideas about pictoral space.

Without diving into any cultural/historical/psychological overview of the subject, I just want to acknowledge that the pictorial frame pre-Cezanne is essentially a diorama.

In other words, at its zenith - when the image is done as we see as faithful - 'stuff looks like stuff' - the image itself is a box containing everything it needs to tell a story. Everything is in superb focus and the eye can find many attractive things between the main subject and the simplest element. The way a painting works - and this is still a pre-Cezanne-ish idea - is that it is a self-contained unit - it is a collection of things. In essence all painting is still life.

There are a lot of profound ideas contained within the frame - line, shape and form. Energy, rhythm and order. Multi-point perspective. The use of color, hot or cool, to push and pull the eye, to create a certain drama. There is a craft - a language in this kind of painting that in itself tells a story - a story I don't really want to tell here, right now. I just want to say that pre-Cezanne, all painting is a diorama - which is to say - it is a collection of things.

It does not work the way the eye works. It works the way memory works. It is about creating a narrative - a point a to point z scenario. Something self contained, containing its own life.

The way the eye works, and I want to get into this a lot more - is that seeing is not just a sensory act, it is also a cognitive act. When we 'see' we not only apprehend the object, but that object must fit into a context, both personal and situational.

Yeah, yeah, that sounds like a bit of pot-smokerish gibberish - one atom in one fingernail could be the center of a whole other universe - yeah yeah yeah. But. There is no escaping that fact that sight as much as any other sense, if not maybe more so, because we are such a sight intensive culture at the moment, is ALL about context. But I don't want to get too deep into this - I just want to say that all painting, pre-Cezanne, is about creating a diorama.

See: At its best, it might look pretty, but in the end, it has little to do with anything actual. It is simply craft of surface and illusion.

This is, I guess, a scattershot way of getting to a simple timeline - one that I am obsessed with, and one that, frankly? Bothers me.

Pre-Cezanne painting is about constructing the pictoral space along architectural lines - everything you need to know is contained within the boundaries of the frame. Masacchio, and De Vinci pretty much defined the space, and a whole bunch of other amazing people refined that space. They were all excellent and painting and drawing things that we could recognize as things.

Post-Cezanne (and why is it that the water is so damned murky around Cezanne? I can tie Courbet and Ingres to Cezanne, dammit) Painting is a much more modern psychological game - it is not only about the way the eye sees, but about questioning what the eye sees.

Painting goes from surface to interior. It goes from solely an ocular activity to a more philosophical activity.

This is all jibber-jabber, but this is my jibber-jabber. I just want a space to write down all the crap I think about while I paint and draw and look.